Thoughts on Jean Conklin

As some of you know, my mother died a few days ago, after several years of illness. Although we are sad, she knew that it was her time. Jean was a remarkable person who lived a full life. I am now with my father helping to settle affairs and celebrate Jean’s life. Below is a version of Jean’s obituary.
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Jean Mieko Conklin, 83, of Hamden, passed away peacefully on July 22, 2010 with her husband of 56 years, Harold C. Conklin, at her side. She was born in Sharon, PA on August 26, 1926 to the late Masanobu and Kikue Hasegawa Morisuye. Besides her husband, Jean leaves her sons, Bruce Conklin and his wife Bonnie Preston, and their children Dylan and Claire Conklin of San Francisco, CA and Mark Conklin and his wife Noelle Strong and their daughter Emma Strong-Conklin of Park City, UT.
Jean is a graduate of Oberlin College (1948) and received her master’s in biology from Brown University (1950). She accompanied her husband on three, year-long anthropological field trips to the Philippines first with the Hanunóo (1957-1958), then with the Ifugao (1962-1963 and 1968-1969). Most of her life she lived in New Haven before recently moving to the Whitney Center in Hamden CT. Early in her career, Jean was a research assistant at Yale Medical School. Other titles she has held at Yale University included executive assistant to the Director of Athletics, to the Director of Human Resources and to the Yale General Counsel. Jean was an indefatigable record keeper, an avid letter writer, and spent countless hours working on many aspects of anthropological documentation. In 2002 she authored “An Ifugao Notebook” that has delighted many readers with a series of short stories told from perspective of each member of the Conklin family during the 1968-1969 field trip. Many lives have been touched in special ways because of Jean and her love of helping other people.

Thoughts on Karen Vranian's Life

* Karen Vranizan has been with our Lab for over 10 years. I met Karen when she was a statistician with Andy Bindman at San Francisco General and consultant for the General Clinical Research Center (GCRC). At that time I was the Associate director of the GCRC, so I had to go to all the meetings to approve protocols. I learned a lot about clinical research at those meetings, and Karen always had something interesting to say.
* Karen began answering statistical questions for our early microarray experiments that Nathan Salomonis, Misha Degtarev and Charlie Redfern had. We were quite confused since we were dealing with some of the first academic Affymetrix datasets. Karen brought clarity to what seemed like a complete mess. Gradually, Karen spent more and more time with the lab.
* Karen helped with overall conceptualization of the GenMAPP project, and was really the first advocate of creating a stand-alone program. Karen interviewed all the programmer candidates, and found Steve Lawlor in a moutain of CVs at Monster.com. It was clear from the start that Steve more experience than the rest of our candidates combined. Steve Lawlor, wrote the first version of GenMAPP, and Karen developed the database and statistics with Steve. This program is still used, and currently serves as a prototype for current projects

* Without Karen I never would have been able to get into informatics in a serious way. Karen's "can do" attitude made it possible to think about projects that I would never tried otherwise.
* Karen also helped with statistical problems for projects that included Alex Zambon, Whit Tingley, Nathan Salomonis, Scott Doniger, Kam Dalhquist, Kristina Hanspers, Allan Kuchinskiy, Ed Hsiao, Alex Pico and many others at Gladstone.
* After several years working in bioinformatics, she left her SFGH job to move to UC Berkeley where she could be closer to home, and work in the Berkeley Functional Genomics lab. At Berkeley she could interact a dynamic community that include, John Ngai, Terry Speed, David V. Schaffer, Kevin Healy and Katie Pollard. Karen introduced me to Katie Pollard, since it was clear that Katie was already thinking ahead of the pack as a graduate student. Karen was the catalyzst for several collaborations with Katie. These projects eventually helped with our recruiting Katie to Gladstone.
* Karen has a career that is marked by the fact that everyone who has worked with her, tried to keep her has long as possible. She never looked for a job, since she was always being recruited to the next project. Her work included some of the early statistics for the establishment of AIDS as a disease, and early clinical trials of the first drugs that had any effect (AZT). She is a graduate of UC Berkeley as a Regents Scholar and later earned her Masters in Statistics at Berkeley. Karen's mother still lives in their hometown of Fresno, and Karen has two sisters who live near the Bay area.
* Several years ago Karen’s long, dormant breast cancer, recurred as metastasis. She has gone for years on chemo, and radiation, but now the tumor is resistant. Over the past few months Karen Vranizan's health has taken a turn for the worse. She is currently at Alta Bates hospital. It is likely that she will be able to go home in a few days. I am planning to visit this weekend (probably Saturday). I am sorry to say that her time with us can probably measured in weeks, rather than months. Tell me if you want me to convey any messages.

Sincerely,

Bruce

June 3, 2009